Third World standards, in political freedom and participation. Is the price too high? Here, historian J. Norman Farmer looks at Singapore's colonial past. Political scientist Thomas Bellows de- scribes the mini-republic that Lee built.

CITY OF THE LION
J. Norman Panner
For more than 2,000 years, the narrow Strait of Malacca has been among the busiest shipping routes in the world, a shallow corridor, bedeviled by shifting sandbars, between East and West. At the southern entrance to the Strait, sev...